Loyalty is a quality that through the years has transformed within my mind and heart, like the sky changes its colors.\u00a0 Previously, it seemed a primitive reactionary behavior in which emotion and self-interest combined to suppress reason and ethics, a mindless purchase of protection or belonging that traded closed eyes for the comforts of stability.\u00a0 In contrast, it has come to indicate a most intimate, holistic expression of ethical behavior.\u00a0 I would now think of loyalty as a determined act to honor the good in a thing, however mixed, however imperfect, at some cost to self.\u00a0 In this sense, loyalty eschews redemption and disdains justification or rehabilitation. \u00a0 It does all this with open eyes.<\/p>\n
In our world, nothing is easier than to shift allegiances or deny complexity. \u00a0We change our team to one that wins, mostly regardless of secondary qualities.\u00a0 We change sources for our material needs based on a few penny’s difference in price, mostly regardless of other qualities.\u00a0 We change life partners or friends based on their marginal return in pleasure or social status. Constancy is rewarded in one dimension only–the ideology that defines our stripes. \u00a0Here, learning or growth is seen as flip-flopping, insincerity. \u00a0Studied, qualified appreciation is viewed as moral timidness. \u00a0Better that we use the amplification of new technologies to blast away at the subtlety of a character, once admired, \u00a0that has come to be seen as impure. \u00a0 Now closed eyes are on the side of change.<\/p>\n
Literature often enacts loyalty answered by redemption or disappointment, loyalty existing in relief on the way to the supposedly eye-opening conclusion.\u00a0 An example I recently experienced is the movie Il y a longtemps que je t’aime <\/em>(I’ve Loved You So Long<\/em>).\u00a0 In this 2008 movie the viewer is presented with the case of a woman just released after fifteen years in prison for the murder of her child, and the loyalty of a sister, who, forbidden by her parents as a teenager to speak of or write to her sister, wrote every day in her secret diary her sister’s name and the number of days she had been away.\u00a0 The movie is haunted until the last moments by a complete absence of explanation, justification, or even narration of the long-ago event that defines the tale.<\/p>\n Beautifully, the movie’s everyday content, deliberative pacing, and the reflective performance of Kristin Scott Thomas as the ex-convict, dissolve the viewers expectation of or need for the facts of the case.\u00a0 This does not occur as a seduction or a sentimental forgetting.\u00a0 The putatively horrible act that precedes the narrative is never forgotten, never minimized.\u00a0 The murderer is not reformed, never seeks forgiveness, never explains.\u00a0 The absence of determinative information, rather, functions to open a view to the whole, to a truth that would be obscured by fact.<\/p>\n Justification and redemption come at last, however, and, as is so often the case, weaken the whole.\u00a0 In literature of all times, a closing gesture of allegiance to conventional morality often subverts an otherwise radical examination of existence.\u00a0 One sees examples of this ultimate weakness at the end of scientific research articles as well, which present compelling and original research only to reach some weakly argued and reproductive conclusion.\u00a0 In this light, loyalty might be seen as a willful deferral of judgment, the willful refusal to put a neat and defining bow on an unfathomable complexity, while yet having the courage to present or receive all possible conclusions.<\/p>\n I mean to say more, however, than that loyalty is a sort of wisdom.\u00a0 Rather, it represents to me one of the ways in which relationships and regard, in contrast to the too often evident effects of tribal interest or prejudice, may elevate knowing and ennoble behavior.\u00a0 Affection, it seems, can also open eyes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Loyalty is a quality that through the years has transformed within my mind and heart, like the sky changes its colors.\u00a0 Previously, it seemed a primitive reactionary behavior in which emotion and self-interest combined to suppress reason and ethics, a … Continue reading